The start of Manifesto

Like, I suspect, many others I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the less-than-ideal functionality, design and customer service of the reselling platforms available. And, with a career in strategy & insight spanning twenty years, I thought it was about time I put all my advice to the ultimate test. So I built Manifesto Kids.

What I learnt very quickly is that while it might be easy to put together a ‘regular’ ecommerce site, a marketplace is in a different league. There is no off-the-peg, white label software solution… or, rather, what software there is tends to be limited. Everything has to be created bespoke… and there are not many developers with experience.

The Manifesto Kids site launched in July 2017 – a cobbled together, barely functioning shopping platform that lacked many fundamental features, including a shopping cart or reliable payment gateway! Over the rest of 2017 we scrambled together bolt-ons and upgrades until it resembled somewhere I’d like to shop.

With a growing user base and frequent questions around when we’d be launching the women’s version, it made sense to expand the scope of offering. Manifesto Woman was born.